History

The first evidence of Çatalhöyük’s existence reached the wider world in the late 1950s, when British archaeologist James Mellaart identified the two mounds in the Konya Plain and began systematic excavations in 1961. What emerged was unlike anything previously known from the Neolithic: a settlement of extraordinary density and complexity, occupied continuously for approximately 1,800 years. Mellaart’s excavations uncovered dozens of houses, hundreds of burials, elaborate wall paintings, and the clay figurines that would later become among the most reproduced images of prehistoric art — particularly a seated female figure, broad-hipped and powerful, interpreted by Mellaart as a mother goddess and by subsequent scholars in more contested terms.

Mellaart’s work ended in controversy in 1965, and the site remained unexcavated for nearly three decades. In 1993, Ian Hodder of Cambridge University reopened the project under the banner of reflexive archaeology — an approach that documented not only what was found but the process and interpretation of finding it. Hodder’s teams introduced isotopic analysis, micromorphology, and systematic zooarchaeology, producing a picture of Çatalhöyük’s inhabitants as people who moved seasonally, ate a mixed diet of cultivated and wild foods, and organised their social world through the household rather than through any centralised authority.

The dead were interred beneath the floors of the houses in which they had lived — under sleeping platforms, beneath hearths, occasionally in clusters of multiple generations. Analysis of the skeletons shows that individuals often lived their entire lives within a very small geographical range, and that the population was remarkably egalitarian: few burials contain significant wealth differentiation. The houses themselves were rebuilt repeatedly on the same footprint, each new structure rising directly on the filled-in remains of the old, creating the characteristic tell mound that is still visible from the Konya Plain today.